21 Digital Marketing Trends for 2018 [+Infographic]

The diversity of digital marketing trends is huge: content marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation and artificial intelligence – just to name a few.

Check out this list of the top digital marketing trends for 2018 to decide what to incorporate into your marketing strategy next year.

Bonus:

In the end, you will find an infographic summarizing all digital marketing trends.

1. Personalized content

The top content marketing trend for 2018 is delivering highly personalized messages. Remember that personalized content is not limited to “Hello $First Name$” messages. With an advanced marketing automation platform, you can create timely and relevant content based on a customer's history and behavior.

Headspace identifies customers who have not used the service in a while and sends a personalized email to wake them up.

2. Privacy protection

Indeed, a personalized approach as mentioned above can yield good results for many businesses. The other side of the coin is that it raises privacy concerns.

We at Liana Technologies believe that AI will play a big role in digital marketing in 2018. AI will shape the way marketing technologies will look like and will set the direction for the new features in marketing tools. That’s why we have recently established an R&D unit for AI. This will help us exploit the AI technology in marketing segmentation. With the development of the R&D unit, our solutions will soon intuitively segment and personalize marketing actions in terms of content, quantity and timing.

But that’s not all.

To advance the use of AI in content marketing, we have joined the frontline AI research project of Aalto University. The research project develops AI algorithms that will be used to determine the personalized advertising content with which B2B end users are more willing to interact.

8. Measuring return on investment (ROI)

As the amount of Big Data increases at a fast pace, marketers need to allocate budgets effectively. The temptation to utilize various marketing tools can result in unexpected financial losses.

Measuring the ROI of marketing efforts helps to manage marketing budgets as it proves the value of your investments. ROI shows which marketing channels should be later exploited as well as defines less effective tools.

Did you know that, according to VentureBeat, email marketing outperforms all other marketing channels in terms of ROI?

9. The 5G revolution

The first mobile phones supporting 5G can be expected to be sold no earlier than 2020.

However, marketers should start acting on it now.

Text-based websites can be replaced with more interactive and engaging webpages. As Internet speed will skyrocket, multimedia-intensive websites will be in huge demand.

For example, take a look at the Black Negative website with incredible interactive elements.

10. New SEO factors

According to the latest SEO ranking study by SEMrush, the following SEO factors are prominent today and will be trending in the near future.

However, the SEO world is evolving quickly and constantly brings unexpected new solutions.

By clicking the “See More” button, you will end up on the delicious Tasty’s website.

16. The growth of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Marketers face a lot of challenges when it comes to raising consumer engagement and awareness.

AR and VR help to overcome these challenges as the technology is relatively novel and allows companies to stand out from the crowd.

Some brands have already taken advantage of the technology in their marketing. For instance, John Lewis pioneered Facebook 360 Collections ads enabling shoppers to check out their products from every angle.

See for yourself.

17. Social Commerce

The concept of social commerce will reshape the way we consume content and shop online. The development of mobile apps facilitates a smooth link between social and transactional activities.

The story of Chinese WeChat is the best-known success story in this matter.

Originally invented as a platform solely for social communication, WeChat has now been enriched with the eCommerce solution.

18. Focus on Generation Z

Gen-Zers are expected to constitute about 40 percent of all consumers by 2020.

That is a powerful customer category.

Marketers should keep in mind that purchasing behavior of Gen Z varies a lot from their predecessors, the millennials.

As such, Gen-Zers tend to have the mobile-first mindset. Research conducted by GlobalWebIndex revealed that they spend longer on their phones each day than on all other devices combined.

Red color shows the data for Gen Z, while blue color represents findings about Millennials. Figures represent the percentage difference between the two generations.

The bottom line: it’s about time to invest in mobile app development.

19. Cross-device marketing

Gone are the days of using the same device for catching up on the news, chatting with your friends, and making online purchases. In fact, a study by Criteo discovered that 41 percent of post-click desktop transactions, in total, come from another device.

Therefore, in the new era of cross-device customer behavior, marketers need to ensure a consistent online experience across all devices and screen sizes.

Think about it:

Are your newsletters displayed correctly on all screens? Does your website look equally nice on an iPhone and a smart TV?

20. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) and landing pages

According to WordStream, only 22 percent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

Elena Bezborodova

Elena is a Marketing Coordinator at Liana Technologies. When you don't see her passionately writing a new blog post for Liana, you can find her baking delicious cheesecakes or jogging. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

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Comments (8)

Jan 30, 2018

Thank you for useful information. The digital marketing space continues to grow, and almost every day, we can find some or the other news related to the field that catches our attention.

Mar 5, 2018

thank you for such a great information

Mar 6, 2018

Great to hear! Hope you can get the most out of these trends in your digital marketing in 2018 :)

- Elena Bezborodova, Marketing Coordinator

Mar 23, 2018

Amazing statistics, Thanks for sharing. We also share an infographic about Mobile Marketing Statistics 2018, You can check it out here: https://goo.gl/qW64ZD. This infographic might be very helpful for anyone into market space.

Apr 16, 2018

Hi Elena,

Thanks for the helpful article! I really enjoyed it and the infographic is well designed too. I have a question on point 14 which I hope you'll clarify. The source you had (for UGC ads that drive 4x higher CTR than normal ads) points to the trust in online reviews.

By your definition, are you classifying an online review (which is usually organic and not paid) as a UGC ad? Also, how did you manage to obtain the "4x higher CTR" finding?

Thank you!

Apr 18, 2018

Hi there, digital whiz :)

Thanks for you comment! Hope you find our article useful :)

The sources that I've used for the infographic sometimes differ from the ones that are used in the article. In this particular example, the infographic contains an example from the Shopify's article called "4 Tactics to Drive Traffic and Sales With User-Generated Content".

In the article, it says: " When stores included UGC in their ads, they saw:

The link to the article: https://www.shopify.com/blog/68976197-4-tactics-to-drive-traffic-and-sales-with-user-generated-content

Let me know if you have more questions :)

- Elena Bezborodova, Marketing Coordinator

Apr 23, 2018

This is a really interesting article. Enjoyed the way you have presented it! As per my point of view, voice search is going to play the primary part and going to be the trending topic for the coming time.